Have 2yo. Can confirm.
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well sure - he was just doin them a favor, after all they were lying on the tracks, nobody forcing them
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But is there some way we can ruin the economy AND make everybody sick?
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In the next scene Nicholas twirls his moustache.
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I’m literally in the middle of writing an essay on the Trolley Problem, the Kobayushi Maru, and the Pandemic, so this whole discussion is timely for me. Oh, and my thesis is “The Trolley Problem is a completely bullshit way of looking at ethics and the world.”
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Lone Guy on the Tracks, “Phew, the trolley went the other way; I’m safe. Shame about all those other people, though… Wait a minute… the blood soaked Trolley is now backing up to the switch!”
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How so? I’ve never understood it to be a way of looking at the world, but as a way of working through the mechanics of how we make moral judgments about practical decisions.
This also happens to be one 74-year-old’s approach to all the other problems.
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People resist offering up the “right” answer to the Trolly Problem because they intuitively understand
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trainyards don’t work like that
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if you kill somebody in the real world, you’ll need a better story than “it seemed like a good idea”
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I guess I don’t follow. In my understanding, the fact that there is no “right” answer to the problem is the point–it’s a way of thinking about how we weigh the different moral considerations. The fact that all the available decisions are mrally unacceptable to some degree is why it’s a dilemma, notwithstanding the fact that trains might not work like that in an actual train yard.
We are all born monsters.
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I’m not a philosophy student or ethicist, but I’ve always thought this “problem” is just stupid. It’s equating “doing nothing” with “doing no harm.” But we all know that’s BS. It likens avoiding personally taking action to stop something bad with not causing harm. In our current world, that just doesn’t fit. If I just do everything that is pre-programmed in my economic structure, I am going to be supporting child labor, ecological tragedies, all kinds of horrible things. Going with the default is (to my way of thinking) no excuse for not doing anything. To my mind, there is one very obvious “right” answer, but it can spur some interesting discussions.
Back OT - that 2 yo is awesome 
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I concur 100%.
It’s supposedly choosing the lesser of two evils. Same as most voters, we vote against the worst evil. And we become so inured to our actions that we forget that we are still voting for evil.
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Well, yeah, a moral dilemma is always easier if you put in a magic wand to remove any negative outcomes, but it’s a lot less interesting as a thought experiment.
Speak only for yourself there, dude.
Each of us contains the greatest capacity for both good and evil; the Indigenous People called it the struggle of two wolves, and the one that wins is whichever one each of feeds the most.
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Reframing and reimagining the problem is a valid approach though, and one that is often sorely lacking in the real world. Just because the problem is framed as an either/or doesn’t means that there really are only two options.
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But that’s not the thought experiment, is it? Like I said, every moral dilemma is pretty easy to solve if you simply wave a magic wand at it.
To your point about reimagining though, I think it’s entirely valid to reimagine the scenario, but if the alternative carries no downside to weigh, what’s the point?
I’m not invested in this particular thought experiment, don’t get me wrong—I just am a little confused at some of the criticism that seems (to me anyway) to be missing the point of the problem.
Remember, there is no harmless joke so obvious that some folks won’t miss it and lecture you on it.
ETA: Billy Graham was truly a wise Cherokee elder, wasn’t he? Check the tag on that “Indian” story. – âpihtawikosisân
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That’s a fair point, to which I can only respond that not all thought experiments are created equal. The stupid and obnoxious ones deserve to be undermined.
Edit to add: and, specifically, there are no shortage of dumb implementations of the trolley problem which are actually barely disguised versions of slippery slope or Hobson’s choice. For example “national parks, or fuel for cars - what’s it going to be?” or “forests, or farmland for food so we can feed babies - what’s it going to be?” In those cases, NOT reframing the question does greater violence to reality than sticking to the rules of the either/or thought experiment.
I apologise for the edits, but I really want to get after this point:
To your point about reimagining though, I think it’s entirely valid to reimagine the scenario, but if the alternative carries no downside to weigh, what’s the point?
Even under the terms of the original trolley problem, reframing the question is useful. This isn’t an original point, but why do we have to chose either one or many deaths? Why can’t we have a thought experiment that frames it as “work to create safe systems to prevent harm vs lassiez faire where the rich can get away with literal workplace murder”? This is especially relevant to self driving vehicles - Musk et al could spend a small amount of time and money trying to solve the trolley problem for their self-driving vehicles, OR they could spend more money (and pay fair taxes!) to create inherently safe systems and infrastructures. “Granny or the cyclist” is one solution to the problem of self driving cars, but so is “internalised costs or externalised costs”. When you allow companies to glide past that second problem you’re ensuring that the world continues to get shittier and shittier.
Or, to put all that more coherently …
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Because…that’s the thought experiment? I don’t mean to be flip, but what you’re talking about is not so much a criticism I don’t think as simply putting forth a different scenario to consider. The whole point of the experiment is the limitation on options and the dilemma they cause. No, the real world usually doesn’t work in that binary a fashion, but I’m not sure thought experiments are only useful if constrained by our everyday experience.
I mean, Newcomb’s problem is a lot less interesting if you just dismiss it because there is no such thing as an observer who can predict the future and/or modify the problem so you can see into the opaque box.
